Hal photosynthesizing — "At lunchtime, Hal Incandenza was lying…"
At lunchtime, Hal Incandenza was lying on his bunk in bright sunlight through the window with his hands laced over his chest, and Jim Troeltsch poked his head in and asked Hal what he was doing, and Hal told him photosynthesizing and then didn’t say anything else until Troeltsch went away.
Context
The whole late-Hal trajectory in one flat sentence: motionless, sunlit, supine, hands laced like a corpse or a sunbather, "photosynthesizing" — a joke about pure passive intake that will stop being a joke by the novel's last hundred pages. He measures the intervals between visitors in his own breaths. (Carlisle hedges an early-withdrawal alternative reading; recorded, not adopted.)